黑色电影与西部片

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  helmut 组长 楼主 2012-03-09 12:33:51

  http://movieskickassblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/richard-widmark-1914-2008.html

  The other day while watching "The Night of the Hunter" I couldn't help but be reminded of Richard Widmark. In "Hunter" Robert Mitchum gives one of the most terrifying performances ever put on film and with the film's Expressionist visuals and very dark mood, it's impossible not to think how would Widmark have fit in it. His performance in 1947's "Kiss of Death", as murderous sociopath Tommy Udo is also one of those instantly iconic roles that leave a mark on you. He practically created what we know as the film noir villain. While Mitchum was all about the mood and suspense, in Widmark's case it was the disturbing combination of that boyishly handsome face with an infamously wicked giggle that made his deeds look like child's play. That you don't remember who else was in the movie, or even what it was about makes no difference, it's perhaps the best way to summarize the legacy of an actor who may have been cast in supporting roles, but never ever played a small part.

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  helmut 组长 楼主 2012-03-09 12:54:19

  http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/feature_view.aspx?FEATURE_ID=128

  In spite of 74 films in 48 years, an unknown number of theatrical performances, and a multitude of TV appearances, I was not expecting the heartfelt standing ovation as Richard Widmark entered the battered main auditorium of London’s National Film Theatre, the undoubted highlight of Crime Scene 2002. But there is something moving about old movie stars, and my wife and I are on our feet with the rest of the audience as this icon of 50s noir and gangster pictures (and much else besides) is ushered on stage by NFT supremo Adrian Wootton. Widmark, not far off 88 years old, is still a commanding presence. He’s wearing a light-coloured, well-tailored suit and tie, his hair silver, a little thinner now but brushed back in the familiar style. Visibly delighted by the reception (the audience includes old friends Christopher Lee, George Cole and director Roy Ward Baker), he bows and applauds Mao-style in acknowledgment. This auditorium has, of course, seen its share of movie icons. Appearances here by Charlton Heston, James Stewart, Judy Garland even, and on one special occasion Sam Peckinpah, all rank high in my personal experience. Later in the week, there’s another memorable occasion. It’s a late addition to the NFT programme, 92 year-old Jules Dassin, the director of Widmark’s sixth film, Night and the City (1950), a new print of which will be shown immediately after Widmark’s appearance.

  Peckinpah and Widmark never worked together, it’s the question I never get to ask, but the over-riding impression of this session is that this modest, unassuming, now ever so slightly frail man, would do his day’s work to the best of his considerable ability, then slip on home to actress and screenwriter Jean Hazlewood, his late wife of 55 years. As he disarmingly explains (in another context), to the "chocolate malts’ he prefers, rather than to the alcoholic roistering that would be de rigueur on a Peckinpah shoot.

  That was not the first surprise of the evening. One of the three film clips shown at the outset of the interview, of course, was his debut film performance as psycho punk Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947), replete with maniacal snigger, stinging one-liners ("I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape") and famously pushing a wheel-chaired Mildred Dunnock down a flight of stairs. It’s a performance that makes clear, according to contemporary critic James Agee, "that murder is one of the kindest things he is capable of."

  What a contrast therefore, even for this son of Sunrise, Minnesota, to learn of his ranch in Connecticut, and his fondness for the English countryside, renting cottages in places across Sussex, Kent and Hertfordshire when filming here. Not to mention his admiration for As Time Goes By, Bob Larbey’s cult sitcom with Geoffrey Palmer and Dame Judy Dench!

  But it’s his professionalism and his cool intensity that is the reason why directors as different as Elia Kazan, John Ford and Don (Dirty Harry) Siegel have found pleasure in working with him. "One of filmdom’s greatest actors" said Siegel in his memoirs A Siegel Film.

  Wootton’s initial questioning explores his early years. Sidetracked into drama at college, he graduated in that subject and, after two years teaching drama, he moved to New York in 1938, where he worked in radio and later on Broadway. He moved to Hollywood in 1947 where he landed the role of Tommy Udo.

  David Thomson (in his invaluable Biographical Dictionary of Cinema) says, "the glee in this performance may even have shocked Widmark himself." Later in the proceedings Widmark admits that if he had to do it over again, he’d tone it down by quite a few notches.

  Neither did director Henry Hathaway want Widmark in the film. "In the worst way, he didn’t" emphasises Widmark. "He wanted a guy called Harry the Hipster." (Can this be Harry "the Hipster" Gibson, 40s New York pianist and vocalist – and author of "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs.Murphy’s Ovaltine"? But that’s another question I never get to ask.) The famously intransigent Hathaway gave Widmark "a terrible time" and Widmark walked off the set, determined never to return. But Hathaway sent an assistant after him with an invitation to lunch. Hathaway and Widmark later became great friends, working together on six films. When Hathaway died, Widmark was a pallbearer at the funeral.

  That film of course launched his career. Going to a party soon after the film’s release he was greeted by John Wayne calling out "Here comes that laughing son of a bitch." Later he would work with Wayne on The Alamo (1960), amicably and well, he claims, but we sense that the two had little in common.

  The conversation switches to directors. Elia Kazan, an old friend from Widmark’s brief Broadway career, later of course most associated with Brando and James Dean, directed Widmark in Panic in the Streets (1950). "The best director of actors ever" declares Widmark. Mention of his performances for Sam Fuller (in 1953’s great crime film, Pickup On South Street, 1954's submarine picture Hell and High Water) brings forth a mention of Fuller’s well-known habit of calling for order on the set by firing a gun into the air: "I said, whoa there Sammy..." And the practice ceased, for that picture at least. But Widmark agrees with most critical opinion that Fuller is one of cinema’s great primitives, and recalls his direction as "lean and to the point."

  He reserves his greatest affection for John Ford for whom he made Two Rode Together (1961) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). "Jack was a real film-maker," says Widmark, emphasising the "maker." As he puts it in an earlier Daily Telegraph interview, in the context of the modern films that (mainly) he cannot bring himself to watch, "Ford didn’t move the camera, he moved the people. I think they’ve forgotten how to do that."

  Pickup on South Street (also to be shown in a new print in the NFT season that accompanies this appearance) was, in fact written (by Sam Fuller himself) for Marilyn Monroe, but delays on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes meant that Jean Peters got the role. Widmark however would later work with Monroe, to his frustration, on Don’t Bother to Knock (directed by Brit, Roy Ward Baker in 1952 during his brief Hollywood career). Marilyn would work up to her performance in take after take; Widmark was at his best in the early ones! "A sweet kid" Widmark remembers "but damaged."

  Amongst actors, there is only one for Widmark – Spencer Tracy. A keen film fan from his childhood, Widmark followed the Tracy career until the end, appearing with him in two films – Broken Lance (1954) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Like Laurence Olivier, he learned more from watching Tracy than from any acting school.

  Later Widmark reminisces about his time spent shooting films in England, notably Night and the City. The film is an adaptation by Jo Eisinger of Gerald Kersh’s 1938 novel of the same name, moving Kersh’s story of hustler Harry Fabian, played by Widmark, from the thirties to post-war London and memorably shot by photographer Max Greene. The film may not, as Kersh’s biographer Paul Duncan points out, be a faithful version of the novel (Kersh later claimed his payment of $40,000 was $10,000 for each word of the title!) but it is damned fine film noir, pursuing Widmark through a bomb-torn London to his final destruction.

  "All my life I’ve been running," says Widmark in the film and it’s the running that Widmark remembers, up and down Soho alleys and across bombsites. "It was exhausting, and I lost several pounds in weight" he admits. But he also remembers the fine performance from actress (and friend) Googie Withers, superb as the night club manager who backs Widmark in his new career as a wrestling promoter.

  It’s Percy Hoskins of Scotland Yard that, later that week, Jules Dassin remembers, not to mention one-time world champion wrestler Stanislaus Zbysko.

  Dassin was himself on the run – black-listed by HUAC (the House UnAmerican Activities Committee run by Senator Joe McCarthy), the group investigating the many Communists and ex-Communists allegedly poisoning the Hollywood film industry in the post-war period. Dassin was noted for his film the 1947 The Naked City (forerunner of the famous TV series) and Thieves Highway (1948), both heavily influenced by post-war Italian directors like Roberto Rossellini. Keen to lend the documentary realism of his previous films to Night and the City, Dassin was lead by Hoskins around the London underworld. The chosen locations lent an unmistakable, almost Dickensian (and historically valuable) flavour to the film.

  Dassin was also delighted to discover that Zbysko, a hero of Dassin’s childhood as one of the eight children of a Russian immigrant living in New York, was still alive. Moreover Zbysko was willing to play Gregorius, a wrestling promoter working with Widmark and in rivalry with his son, played by Herbert Lom.

  The film will be shown in two versions: tonight the 95 minute American print with an over-insistent score by Franz Waxman. At his later interview Dassin is amazed to discover that the 101 minute British version, to be shown later in the month, has a different score specially written for the UK release by Benjamin Frankel, of which Dassin was previously unaware!

  "A shameful period" declares Widmark, a life-long liberal, of the HUAC "witch-hunts" as they became known. Dassin, later that week, is still clearly upset by the betrayals of the time. But it is an era with some unlikely ‘heroes’. One such, lauded by both men, was the legendarily belligerent Darryl Zanuck ("For God’s sake don’t say yes until I’ve finished talking!"), production head at Twentieth Century Fox. Widmark remembers him as an excellent producer who put the emphasis on getting the best writers. Dassin remembers him as the sympathetic producer who packed him off to London with instructions to shoot all "the most expensive scenes" of Night and the City, so that the studio could not shut down the film when the HUAC subpoena was served on its director.

  It would be five years before Dassin, pursued across Europe by the US government, can make another film. It will be the excellent French crime film Rififi, a huge European success, its completely silent robbery sequence rarely bettered. It won him the Best Director prize at the 1955 Cannes Festival, but received only limited release in the USA. Several films in the Widmark career have black-list connections. Widmark does not mention the politics of Elia Kazan, his director on Panic in the Streets, but Kazan, a hero of the American Left, would later become a notorious "friendly" witness to HUAC. His testimony would be amongst the bitterest blows to his old friend Jules Dassin. Dassin has not spoken to Kazan since.

  Widmark would also work three times (Broken Lance, 1959’s Warlock – also in the season, and Alvarez Kelly from 1966) with director Edward Dmytryk, one of only two directors in the Hollywood Ten, the first group to be subpoenaed by HUAC. And Don Siegel’s 1968 film Madigan (with Widmark as policeman Dan Madigan) scheduled later that night, has a co-script credit to Abraham Polonsky, writer of Body and Soul (1947) and writer-director of Force of Evil (1948), perhaps the greatest creative casualty of the black-list. Madigan was his first movie credit for seventeen years.

  By now the Widmark questioning has been thrown open to the audience. There are questions about those of his films that he likes (he is particularly proud of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg), those that he hates (1978’s The Swarm gets pride of place, along with the Dennis Wheatley adaptation To the Devil a Daughter from 1975). Widmark is asked a question about the on-set tension between director Joe Mankiewicz and actress Linda Darrell whilst they shot No Way Out, another of Widmark’s four films in 1950, as a racist criminal receiving treatment from prison doctor Sidney Poitier. "What on-set tension?" he replies. "All I can recall is that when we looked around for Joe or Linda at lunchtime, they were nowhere to be seen." He pauses. "Hanky panky..." he adds and gives us a characteristic Widmark grin.But many of the questions are of the "what was it like to work with..." variety, and Widmark is clearly not prone to dish the dirt. A question about his favourite actresses brings forth a list that starts with Linda Darnell and Googie Withers and will clearly go on as long as his memory holds out.

  It’s a faintly disappointing end to a memorable event. Widmark stands, bowing graciously and makes his way off the stage. Another standing ovation takes place. We are left with the image of his middle-aged cavalry Captain in Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, shyly in love with and concerned for the safety of Carroll Baker. Later my wife and I see him leaving the NFT, escorted by a burly set of security men, and a huge cohort of fans.

  The films, of course, remain. Madigan, for instance. Under-rated by some (see Mike Ashley’s new Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, for example), it’s an intelligently written police thriller with the emphasis as much on the changing moralities of the time as on the action. It’s a splendidly laconic, seemingly effortless but entirely convincing performance from Widmark’s later years. In the 73-shot finale, Widmark dies, sacrificing himself whilst ensuring that the psycho killer who ran off with his gun also meets his maker. Four years later Universal will resurrect Madigan for an (unsuccessful) six episode TV series.

  There IS something moving about old movie stars. It’s about as close as you and I get to immortality.

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  helmut 组长 楼主 2012-04-03 14:31:23

  http://www.moviecrazed.com/outpast/widmark.html

  Thirty years ago, Richard Widmark was propelled to stardom when he pushed the crippled mother of a stool pigeon down a flight of stairs in “Kiss of Death.” At 62, Mr. Widmark is still pushing people around, even presidents of the United States. In “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” he casually instructs his troops to gun down a troublesome group that happens to include the panicked President, and in the coming “Domino Principle,” he springs a sharpshooter from prison for the purpose of presidential assassination. On a more plebeian plane, he will stalk a spoilsport who threatens to blow up an amusement park in “Rollercoaster.”

  His parts are skimpier than in the days when he was under contract to 20th Century-Fox, a period when he was systematically sapped of his potential, typecast first as a sniveling sadist and later as a jaundiced, stiff-lipped hero. Yet he seems content with his career, even if it has not measured up to the expectations of the critics who hailed the chillingly decadent, smoothly sinister recruit from such innocuous Broadway baubles as “Kiss and Tell” as a strikingly original talent. Today, he looks back with special fondness on his frantic 1940’s phase when he careened from one radio dilemma to another, from “Gangbusters” to “Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories.”

  “That was the best time of my life,” Widmark recalls. “It was a very nice living, and completely anonymous. I worked with some marvelous people – Joe Cotten, Arlene Francis, Agnes Moorehead, Orson Welles, Art Carney. It took me the longest time to realize that Art Carney was funny, because we were always doing ‘Gangbusters’ together on Saturday night.”

  One afternoon, he was summoned to an interview with some visiting moviemakers, a meeting from which he emerged with a script tucked under his arm. “That night, between breaks of a radio show called ‘Inner Sanctum,’ I was reading the script and suddenly I said, ‘Hey, listen to this. This guy pushes a lady down the stairs in a wheelchair!’ We all laughed, but I got the part and did it in 13 days, with no idea it was going to be anything special.”

  It was special enough to turn off his radio anonymity and tune him in to Hollywood, where he whiled away his time menacing – and occasionally being menaced by – such Fox favorites as Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell, Anne Baxter and Susan Hayward, a nervous newcomer named Marilyn Monroe. “I liked Marilyn very much. She was a nice girl. But It was difficult working with her in ‘Don’t Bother to Knock.’ Darryl Zanuck wanted to make her a dramatic actress, even though acting scared her to death. So we had a lot of trouble just getting her out of her dressing room.”

  In the midst of all the movie madness, Mr. Widmark must have longed for the sanity of the legitimate theater. “I hate to say this, but I don’t like that life,” says Widmark, a family man who splits his year between a cozy home in Connecticut and a sprawling ranch in California. “Early on, I decided the kind of life I wanted, and that’s what I got, right or wrong. I was never so crazy about acting that I wanted to dedicate my life to it. I’m very lucky to be living the kind of dumb life I like to live. I hate cities, and I love farming and a million other things that have nothing to do with the theater.”

  Could it be that Widmark is burning to do one more major movie, to deliver a performance that will justify the faith of those fervent critics back in the 40’s?

  “I wish I could answer yes, but at this stage I just go along if someone wants me and it looks enjoyable. Just say that I’m not a true artist. Hell – look at my age; I’m grateful if I wake up in the morning and I’m still breathing.”

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